CHAPTER IX

IN WHICH THE TOP-FLOOR-BACK TURNS OUT TO BE AN ACQUAINTANCE AND SCHEMES ARE UNFOLDED FOR THE SALVATION OF OF AN EFFETE RACE

We had at school a literature master who, in the course of many hundreds of discourses, made two remarks which have never left me; or would it not be fairer to say that of the hundreds of lectures which I heard from a certain literature master I have succeeded in retaining two injunctions? One was the comment (which he had from Dr. Johnson) that repetition is a fault rarely committed by bad writers, and the other, that what we call coincidences should never be noticed. This being so, I cannot describe as a coincidence the fact that the young Socialist at Dabney's turns out to be our own Socialist of the top floor of whose profounder sincerities Mrs. Wiles is so sceptical. I saw him the next day both enter the house and leave it, banging the door with a vehemence that would break up any delicately organized communistic home; and since then we have met in mutual recognition and have conversed.

Spanton seems to be very much in earnest--a boyish figure of about twenty-six, clean shaven, but without the soft brown clothes, costly Jaegerisms, and other external insignia of his kind. On the contrary, he is a bit of a dandy, uses quite superlative soap, and has a manicure set. It has been said that nothing is more annoying than to be agreed with when one is indulging a mood of self-depreciation. Well, Spanton will never be annoyed that way.

"They're a foolish lot," he said, referring to the company at Dabney's. "They go there every week just to cackle, and none of them ever lives at all. Except possibly that blackguard, Rudson-Wayte, and he ought to be in gaol. But the whole world's like that. All my friends and acquaintances are either writing or talking or vegetating. Dabney kindles to excitability every day over something said in the House, or something said by other journalists about something said in the House, and that's how he will go on spending this boon of life to the end--never travelling, never suffering, never being hungry or thirsty or wicked. What a way to live! And your novelists and dramatists too"--like so many of the world's reformers this young man has the most exasperating way of saying "you" and "your"--"your novelists and dramatists trafficking in the sham emotions of their puppets, how they are wasting this boon of life! And all their myriad audiences in the theatres, or readers reclining on sofas, how they are wasting it!--lulling themselves with the stories of fictitious mannikins, instead of doing something, almost no matter what. And this enemy of society who lives under our very roof, the cinema man, what an account there will be to settle with him one day! He's one of the worst lullers.

"It infuriates me. Something has got to be done, and I'm going to do it. England's got to look herself in the face. She's been dodging the mirror for years, but she's got to do it. I'm out to see that she does."

Asked what he did towards that end, Spanton said that at the moment he was delivering a series of lectures at such boys' schools as permitted treason to be talked. They were addresses on Socialism; not pure Socialism, but a brand of his own.

"Because, of course," he said, "we must get hold of the younger generation. The middle-aged and the elderly are no good; young men, youths, and boys are the best material. I show them as vividly as I can how dependent all of them are on labour not only for their comfort, but for the necessities of life. I have slides illustrating all the chief industries and some of the minor ones, even to cricket-bat making. I take them down coal-mines and show them what kind of a life a miner has to lead before our eggs and bacon can be cooked. I draw comparisons between their own pocket-money and the earnings of many kinds of labourers. In short I do all I can to make them think vividly of what the underworld of toil is like, and to realize how the spectacle of the upper world of wealth, as reflected in the halfpenny papers, must strike the toiler. If once they can be brought to understand this--to put themselves in the place of those others--things will be easier. Because it is a realization which they will never forget. I don't draw any moral. I don't suggest that there shall be an equal division of property or anything like that. For one thing, the schoolmasters wouldn't let me, and for another, I don't believe in equality. But I do drop a hint now and then that cricket and football are not all, and that the possession of riches carries with it a responsibility to the State."

"I should guess," I said, "that not the least of your difficulties in preparing your addresses is softening the adjectives. You must want to say so much more than you dare."

"O Heavens, yes!" he replied fervently. "I have the very deuce of a time with the blue pencil. And there are other troubles too. Some little while ago, for example, I was just rabid about a freak dinner that had been given in one of the big London restaurants, where some dancing girl was throned on a solid bank of roses that cost eight hundred pounds, and the musicians were seated in a barca that glided about a lake made for that evening only. There was a strike on at the time, and the contrast between this lavish rotten luxury on the one side and the destitution of the strikers' wives and children on the other was too extreme. In the old days when the poor couldn't read, or papers were too expensive, such dinners had a chance of being missed; but to-day everything is made public and reaches even the poorest, and helps very properly to inflame them. That is one of the principal reasons why nothing is ever going to be the same any more.

"Well, anyhow, I found something to say about this, and said it with a certain amount of unambiguity. And what happened? The schoolmaster seemed at the time quite satisfied, but I received a letter from him later asking me not to come again. It appears, as I afterwards found out, that one of the givers of the feast was a notoriously rich Jew whose son was at the school. The son wrote home about it and the father threatened to take him away if any more such lectures were delivered. So there you are!

"But what I really want to see in force more than anything else," Spanton went on, "and these lectures of mine are really a kind of gentle preamble to the campaign, is compulsory manual labour for everybody. A kind of pacific conscription. Ruskin, you remember, set his undergraduates to make a road. They did it perhaps rather too much as a lark and not steadily or sweatily enough. I would catch the boys earlier and put them for one or two years to mining, building, engineering, digging, whatever it is, at the time when they would naturally be at the Universities or just entering office. That would enlarge their sympathies and give them the practical insight which is the next best thing to imagination. But the time for such a scheme is not yet."

"It seems to me," I said, "that your scheme might go farther with enormously beneficial results. If to know all is to understand all, a system of interchange of employment and positions, carried out fully, would get into every section of society an understanding of the others. If the lady took a turn in the kitchen she would understand her cook's difficulties, while the cook in the dining-room would know for the first time what it felt like when the dishes were cold, underdone, or late. A bond would thus grow. Again, if the impatient patron of the restaurant had to take the waiter's napkin for a while, he would learn not only the reason of delay, but what it feels like to be spoken to like dirt, and the waiter, if he came in equally hungry and pressed for time, would appreciate the provocation to be sarcastic and rasping. And so on, right through society, until we all knew."

Spanton was pleased to say that my amendment was sensible; but it would not be very practicable, he thought. He has little humour, and no respect for it.

"And meanwhile," I asked, "what trade have you learned?"

He said he had learned none. He had been to Paris to learn painting; had given it up and become a convinced Socialist, and was now devoting himself to propaganda.

"But surely," I said, "it would be well, if only to strengthen your case, to put the plan into execution yourself. You are so young and you lay yourself open to the charge of inconsistency."

"I don't care about that," he said. "All Socialists are inconsistent: that is the first thing to get into your head in any dealings with us. But we are not more inconsistent than Christians--that is, if Christ was a Christian, which one often doubts. My special line is clear thinking and persuasiveness, and one must do what one can do best."

"And meanwhile what of the great boon of life?" I said. "Is it not in danger, like unpopular bills, of being 'talked out'?"

He was silent. "Oh, well," he said at last, "perhaps I like talking best. I wonder. But it's constructive talk. You can't deny that."